What is the Value of Conformity?
Do not take the concept of interchangeable parts for granted.
1793 – One essential value of this organization is the idea of interchangeability. In 1793, Eli Whitney’s mass production of muskets, based on the principle of interchangeable parts, announced the dawn of the industrial age.
- Google Timeline: interchangeable parts eli whitney
retrieved 2009-10-02
The paradigm which ushered in the Industrial Age begged to be applied everywhere – from muskets to sewing machines to locomotives to automobiles; machines which built machines became a matter of course.
In the “long run”, all of these factors of production can be adjusted by management. The “short run”, however, is defined as a period in which at least one of the factors of production is fixed.
A fixed factor of production is one whose quantity cannot readily be changed. Examples include major pieces of equipment, suitable factory space, and key managerial personnel.
A variable factor of production is one whose usage rate can be changed easily. Examples include electrical power consumption, transportation services, and most raw material inputs. In the short run, a firm’s “scale of operations” determines the maximum number of outputs that can be produced. In the long run, there are no scale limitations.
- Production Theory Basics
rev# 317048388 at Wikipedia.org
2009-09-30 07:39
Could the theory of production be applied to more than inanimate objects?
The machine-building machines still needed an operator who could be relied upon to behave without deviation.
Our knowledge about operant conditioning has greatly influenced educational practices. Children at all ages exhibit behavior. Teachers and parents are, by definition, behavior modifiers (if a child is behaviorally the same at the end of the academic year, you will not have done your job as a teacher; children are supposed to learn (i.e., produce relatively permanent change in behavior or behavior potential) as a result of the experiences they have in the school / classroom setting.
- Applications of Operant Conditioning to Education
Huitt, W., & Hummel, J. (1997)
Because students believe what they are told, explicitly and implicitly, about the world they are entering, they behave in ways that fulfill the prophecies the system makes about them and about that world. This is the linkback that completes the system: students do more than accept the way things are, and ideology does more than damp opposition. Students act affirmatively within the channels cut for them, cutting them deeper, giving the whole a patina of consent and weaving complicity into everyone’s life story.
- Legal Education as Training for Hierarchy
by Duncan Kennedy
A system of order is installed.
Complications were to be expected…
It appears then that there is a serious discrepancy between the American ideal of “rugged individualism” and its actual implementation. A teen-ager has to learn carefully that this blueprint for American individualism is not generalizable and that there are definite areas of limitations and prohibitions. The fact of non-generalizability destroys the simplicity and predictability of always responding to the same cue in identical or similar ways, thereby complicating the learning process and rendering the behavioral blueprint ambiguous and situational.
- Individualism vs. Conformity
life-us.blogspot.com
2009-11-19
It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, three hundred meters into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
- War is peace
- Freedom is slavery
- Ignorance is strength
- 1984 by George Orwell
… though, eventually, superior virtue will surely triumph.
All flaws exposed
You are raw material
Do good work for us
